Contents

February 1, 2011 (7)

-mention contemporary naturalist view of love. Love as pair bonding plus culture. Love of children as expressions of the code.

Small Group Exercise

Taking into consideration our thought experiment from last class (Out of 100 or 1000 people that you are sexually attracted to, how many could you imagine having a successful long term relationship with? -- Assume that you both have similar and good relationship skills, etc.). But then try to move your discussion to connect with the early speech of the symposium. Is there one love or two? Is love a narrow phenomena of relationship or a broader force in nature or beyond nature?

Socrates Questioning of Agathon

Is love love of something?

Love loves that which he/she has need of.

You don't need something you already have.

C: Love is the pursuit of something we have need of.

Does our need of the Good cover all cases of genuine love?

"Desire has a structure of absence."

Empiricism and Rationalism

Empiricism

--belief that the evidence of our sense is the source of certainty of objective knowledge. Great benefits is the inter-subjective certainty of observation. Problem

What is the relationship between our empirical representation of reality and "mind-independent" reality?